Abstract

This paper uses critical discourse analysis of English higher education institutions’ policy statements about access to explore the changing ways that institutions have used language to shift their market positionality away from widening participation for all and the process of higher education to ‘fair access’ (i.e. social mobility for the ‘brightest’) and the outcome of producing ‘professionals’. Analysis is drawn from the Access Agreements two sets of sampled institutions (ten large prestigious pre-1992 universities and ten former polytechnics, known as post-1992 universities ) at two points in time: 2006-07 (the first wave of Access Agreements) and 2012-13 (the first set of Access Agreements in the new funding regime).